A
little philosophy inclineth
man’s mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds
about to
religion.

For
God, on the first day, only created light, and assigned a whole day to
that work, without creating any material substance
thereon.
Novum
Organum section 70

But
any one who properly considers the subject, will find natural
philosophy to be, after the word of God, the surest remedy against
superstition, and the most approved support of faith. She is therefore
rightly bestowed upon religion as a most faithful attendant, for the
one exhibits the will and the other the power of God. Nor was he wrong
who observed, "Ye err, not knowing the Scriptures and the power of
God;" thus uniting in one bond the revelation of his will, and the
contemplation of his power.
Novum
Organum section 89

Let
us begin from God, and show that our pursuit from its exceeding
goodness clearly proceeds from him, the Author of good and Father of
light.
Novum
Organum section 93

Probably, so
far as I know, there is no professor
of Hebrew or Old Testament at any world-class university who does not
believe
that the writer(s) of Genesis 1-11 intended to convey to their readers
the ideas
that (a) creation took place in a series of six days which were the
same as the
days of 24 hours we now experience; . . . Or, to put it negatively, the
apologetic arguments which suppose the "days" of creation to be long
eras of time, the figures of years not to be chronological, and the
flood to be
a merely local Mesopotamian flood, are not taken seriously by any such
professors, as far as I know.
letter to David Watson April 23 1984

But the same
point, the unity of the poem, could be understood, and has been
understood, in the very opposite sense: namely, God makes himself known
in two complementary ways, first
through the great works of creation which control the world, and
secondly through
his special communication exemplified here by his law. The two channels
of natural and revealed theology are here very
properly to be seen. It is not surprising that the Psalm was seen as a
fine manifestation
of their complementarity, as was traditional in the older
Christianity. Biblical
Faith and Natural Theology (1993) Chapter
5.2 p.87

I do not have
any starting-point within the tradition
of natural theology. In principle, my starting-point is rather against
it. To me the arguments of natural
theology are not a congenial field. Even if natural theology should be
a valid mode of procedure, I
doubt if I would find it easy to practice it. In this respect, I share
many of the doubts and objections that modern
theologians have voiced against the whole idea of it. ... What I do
find, after a long period of
struggling with the problems, is that the Bible does imply something
like natural theology and makes it impossible for
us to avoid the issues that it involves.Biblical
Faith and Natural Theology
(1993) Chapter 6.1 p.102-3

The God of
Israel alone had power, other gods were nonentities who
could not do anything; Yahweh alone had created the world and guided
what went on within it.Biblical
Faith and Natural Theology
(1993) Chapter 7 p.142

Once again we
see: natural theology is supported by the Bible, may be made to combine
with the Bible, but is also an aspect of the cultural limitedness of
the Bible. The Bible, especially the Old Testament,
built upon the Near Eastern cultural patterns of the Semitic-speaking
peoples. It knew nothing about the way in
which the world had actually originated or how the earliest human
beings had lived. Biblical
Faith and Natural Theology
(1993) Chapter 7 p.154-5

More might be
made, perhaps, of the creation story of Genesis itself. For generations
people have become accustomed to say that the first chapter of Genesis
did not purport to be a scientific account of the origins of the world,
and this was an understandable apologetic response to the fact that the
account is not scientifically true. But to say that Genesis does not
purport to be scientific may be a mistaken sort of apologetic argument.
In its own context and purpose, for the people who elaborated it and
composed it, it
was a sort of scientific account. Something akin to
the thinking of Mesopotamian list science may have lain behind it, and
this, with the implication of transreligious and transcultural
understanding, lends a certain tinge of natural theology. The writers
of Genesis meant it as a cosmological organization of the world, in
which a place and role are given for the great outer elements, light
and dark, sky, earth, and sea, sun, moon, and stars, and also for the
closer, inner environment, vegetable and animal, and finally for
humanity at the centre of it all. Its seven days, linked by the
subsequent genealogies with the chronology which runs down through the
following centuries, deliberately inaugurate the exact temporal and
calendrical framework for later history. To us none of this constitutes
a science; it is closer to legend or
mythology. But to them it was as close as they could come to a sort of
science. However, none of the base on which it was worked out was
scientific.
They had
no means of knowing how the world had begun, no means of
experimentation, no
methods of research other than the most obvious human experience. Their
view of the world rested on religious tradition, both without and
within Israel, and on the
refashioning of these traditions in order to fit with the monotheistic
deity of Israel. And thus, though, as we have seen, the Israelite
doctrine of creation was one of the major influences out of which
natural theology was to come, nothing worthy of the name of
science was involved in the evolution of that doctrine or in its
exposition.
Biblical
Faith and Natural Theology
(1993) Chapter 9.1 p.175-6

The failure,
as it was supposed to be, of the quest for the historical Jesus left
the impression that Jesus could not be accounted for as a historical
person.
Biblical
Faith and Natural Theology
(1993) Chapter 9.3 p.194

Some people
said that the Jews were newcomers on
the scene of world history and therefore had no status within
civilization such
as the Greeks had. Not at all, wrote the Jewish historian Josephus: the
Jews
have been here all the time and, unlike the Greeks, who have a lot of
different
and contradictory books, the Jews have one precise and unified history,
one
single narrative that goes back to the creation of the world about five
thousand
years before. The central point was the one book that gave a clear, or
fairly
clear, sequence in years from the absolute creation of the world down
into later
history. “Pre-scientific
Chronology: The Bible and the Origin of the World” (1999)

And the
evening and the morning were one day. Why
does Scripture say "one day" not "the first day"? Before
speaking to us of the second, the third, and the fourth days, would it
not have
been more natural to call that one the first which began the series? If
it
therefore says "one day," it is from a wish to determine the measure
of day and night, and to combine the time that they contain. Now
twenty-four
hours fill up the space of one day--we mean of a day and of a night;
and if, at
the time of the solstices, they have not both an equal length, the time
marked
by Scripture does not the less circumscribe their duration. It is as
though it
said: twenty-four hours measure the space of a day, or that, in reality
a day is
the time that the heavens starting from one point take to return there.
Thus,
every time that, in the revolution of the sun, evening and morning
occupy the
world, their periodical succession never exceeds the space of one
day.
Homily II.8

"Let the earth
bring forth." This short
command was in a moment a vast nature, an elaborate system. Swifter
than thought
it produced the countless qualities of
plants. Homily
V.10

The water had
been gathered into the reservoir
assigned to it, the earth displayed its productions, it had caused many
kinds of
herbs to germinate and it was adorned with all kinds of plants.
However, the sun
and the moon did not yet exist, in order that those who live in
ignorance of God
may not consider the sun as the origin and the father of light, or as
the maker
of all that grows out of the
earth. Homily
VI.2

By
irreducibly complex I mean
a single system composed of several well-matched, interacting parts
that
contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the
parts
causes the system to effectively cease functioning. An irreducibly
complex
system cannot be produced directly (that is, by continuously improving
the initial
function, which continues to work by the same mechanism) by slight,
successive
modification of a precursor, system, because any precursors to an
irreducibly complex
system that is missing a part is by definition
nonfunctional. Darwin's
Black Box (1996) p.39

In
the abstract, it might be
tempting to imagine that irreducible complexity simply requires
multiple
simultaneous mutations -- that evolution might be far chancier than we
thought,
but still possible. Such an appeal to brute luck can never be
refuted... Luck is
metaphysical speculation; scientific explanations invoke
causes. Darwin's Black
Box (1996) p.40

In
the face of the enormous complexity
that modern biochemistry has uncovered in the cell, the scientific
community is
paralyzed. No one at Harvard University, no one at the National
Institutes of
Health, no member of the National Academy of Sciences, no Nobel prize
winner --
no one at all can give a detailed account of how the cilium, or vision,
or blood
clotting, or any complex biochemical process might have developed in a
Darwinian
fashion. Darwin's Black
Box (1996) p.187

Some
proponents see great
significance in the fact that they can write short computer programs
which
display images on the screen that resemble biological objects such as a
clam
shell. The implication is that it doesn't take much to make a clam. But
a biologist
or biochemist would want to know, if you opened the computer clam,
would you see
a pearl inside? If you enlarged the image sufficiently, would you see
cilia and ribosomes
and mitochondria and intracellular transport systems and all the other
systems
that real, live organisms need? Darwin's Black
Box (1996) p.191

Imagine a room in which a body lies crushed, flat as a pancake. A dozen
detectives crawl around, examining the floor with magnifying glasses
for any clue to the identity of the perpetrator. In the middle of the
room, next to the body, stands a large, gray elephant. The detectives
carefully avoid bumping into the pachyderm’s legs as they crawl, and
never even glance at it. Over time the detectives get frustrated with
their lack of progress but resolutely press on, looking even more
closely at the floor. You see, textbooks say detectives must “get their
man,” so they never even consider elephants.

There is an
elephant in the roomful of scientists who are trying to explain the
development of life. The elephant is labeled “intelligent design.” To a
person who does not feel obliged to restrict his search to
unintelligent causes, the straightforward conclusion is that many
biochemical systems were designed.Darwin's Black
Box (1996) p.192-3

Coyne
complains the book is ‘heavily larded’ with quotations from
evolutionists. This leads into his being upset with being quoted
himself, as discussed above. That aside, however. I don’t know what to
make of this statement. What is a book concerning evolution supposed to
contain if not quotes from evolutionists? Quotes from
accountants?
"Reply to
my critics" Boston
Review November 1996

The
reviewers are not rejecting
design because there is scientific evidence against it, or because it
violates some
principle of logic. Rather, I believe they find design unacceptable
because they
are uncomfortable with the theological ramifications of the theory. In
his essay
to the Pontifical Academy of Science, Pope John Paul II noted
that a theory
of evolution has two parts, the mechanism and the philosophy attached
to that
mechanism. Putting it like that, however, makes it sound as if any
philosophy
can be mixed and matched with any mechanism. But the situation is not
really
that clear-cut. While Catholics and many other Christians could
accommodate the mechanism
of Darwin to their theolgy (with the reservation that the course of
evolution is
not truly random, but foreordained by God), materialists require
something
like Darwinism because, ultimately, materialism says that life and
intelligence
had to arise unaided from brute matter.
Signs of Intelligence (2001) p.100

I
never wrote that individual parts
of an IC system couldn't be used for any other purpose. (That would be
silly—who would ever claim that a part of a mousetrap couldn't be used
as a
paperweight, or a decoration, or a blunt weapon?) Quite the opposite, I
clearly
wrote in Darwin's Black Box that even
if the individual parts
had their own functions, that still does not
account for the
irreducible complexity of the system. In fact, it would most likely
exacerbate
the problem... Miller's argument is that since a subset of the proteins
of the
flagellum can have a function of their own, then the flagellum is not
IC and
Darwinian evolution could produce it. That's it! He doesn't show how
natural
selection could do so; he doesn't cite experiments showing that such a
thing is
possible; he doesn't give a theoretical
model. Response to
Begley February
18 2004

Although scientists would
love to undertake larger, more comprehensive studies, the scale of the
problem
is just too big. There aren't nearly enough resources available to a
laboratory
to perform them.

So,
in lieu of definitive
laboratory tests, by default most biologists work within a Darwinian
framework
and simply assume what cannot be demonstrated. Unfortunately, that can
lead to
the understandable but nonetheless corrosive intellectual habit of
forgetting
the difference between what is assumed and what demonstrated.
Differences
between widely varying kinds of organisms are automatically chalked up
to random
mutation and natural selection by even the most perceptive scientists,
and even
the most elegant of biological features is reflexively credited to
Darwin's
theory. The
Edge of Evolution (2007) p. 9-10

Thanks
to its enormous
population size, rate of reproduction, and our knowledge of the
genetics, the
single best test case of Darwin's theory is the history of malaria.
Much of this
book will center on this disease. Many parasitic diseases afflict
humanity, but
historically the greatest bane has been malaria, and it is among the
most
thoroughly studied. For ten thousand years the mosquito-borne parasite
has
wreaked illness and death over vast expanses of the globe. Until a
century ago
humanity was ignorant of the cause of malarial fever, so no conscious
defense
was possible. The only way to lessen the intense, unyielding selective
pressure
from the parasite was through the power of random mutation. Hundreds of
different mutations that confer a measure of resistance to malaria
cropped up in
the human genome and spread through our population by natural
selection. These
mutations have been touted by Darwinists as among the best, clearest
examples of
the abilities of Darwinian evolution.

And
so they are. But, as
we'll see, now that the molecular changes underlying malaria resistance
have
been laid bare, they tell a much different tale than Darwinists
expected -- a
tale that highlights the incoherent flailing involved in a blind
search. Malaria
offers some of the best examples of Darwinian evolution, but that
evidence
points both to what it can, and more important what it cannot, do.
Similarly,
changes in the human genome, in response to
malaria, also point to the radical
limits of the efficacy of random mutation.

Because
it has been studied
so extensively, and because of the astronomical number of organisms
involved,
the evolutionary struggle between humans and our ancient nemesis
malaria is the
best, most reliable basis we have for forming judgments about the power
of
random mutation and natural selection. Few other sources of information
even
come close. And as we'll see, the few that do tell similar
tales. The
Edge of Evolution
(2007) p. 12-3

The defense of
vertebrates from invasion by
microscopic predators is the job of the immune system, yet hemoglobin
is not part
of the immune system. Hemoglobin's main job is a part of the
respiratory system,
to carry oxygen to tissues. Using hemoglobin to fight off malaria is an
act of
utter desperation, like using a TV set to plug a hole in the Hoover
Dam. Even
leaving aside the question of where the dam and TV set came from --
which is no
small question -- it must be conceded that this Darwinian process is a
tradeoff
of least-bad alternatives. The army in its trenches is suffering loss
upon loss.
No matter which way it turns, in the war fought by random mutation and
natural
selection, it is losing function, not
gaining. The
Edge of Evolution (2007) p.29-30

Both sickle and
HbC and quintessentially hurtful
mutations because they diminish the functioning of the human body. Both
induce
anemia and other detrimental effects. In happier times they would never
gain a
foothold in human populations. But in desperate times, when an invasion
threatens the city, it can be better in the short run to burn a bridge
to keep
the enemy out. The Edge of
Evolution (2007) p.34-5

Real arms races
are run by highly intelligent,
bespectacled engineers in glass offices thoughtfully designing shiny
weapons on
modern computers. But there's no thinking in the mud and cold of
nature's
trenches. At best, weapons thrown together amidst the explosions and
confusion
of smoky battlefields are tiny variations on old ones, held together by
chewing
gum. If they don't work, then something else is thrown at the enemy,
including
the kitchen sink -- there's nothing "progressive" about that. At its
usual worst, trench warfare is fought by attrition. If the enemy can be
stopped
or slowed by burning your own bridges and bombing your own radio towers
and oil
refineries, then away they go. Darwinian trench warfare does not lead
to
progress -- it leads back to the Stone
Age. The
Edge of Evolution (2007) p.42-3

Is
the conclusion that the universe was
designed -- and that the design extends deeply into life -- science,
philosophy,
religion, or what? In a sense it hardly matters. By far the most
important
question is not what category we place it in, but whether a conclusion
is true.
A true philosophical or religious conclusion is no less true than a
true
scientific one. Although universities might divide their faculty and
courses
into academic categories, reality is not obliged to respect such
boundaries.
The
Edge of Evolution (2007) p.232

The
strong appearance of design
allows a disarmingly simple argument: if it looks, walks and quacks
like a duck,
then, absent compelling evidence to the contrary, we have warrant to
conclude
it's a duck. Design should not be overlooked simply because it's so
obvious. Design
for Living
February 7 2005

The most
essential prediction of Darwinism is
that, given an astronomical number of chances, unintelligent processes
can make
seemingly-designed systems, ones of the complexity of those found in
the cell.
ID specifically denies this, predicting that in the absence of
intelligent input
no such systems would develop. So Darwinism and ID make clear, opposite
predictions of what we should find when we examine genetic results from
a
stupendous number of organisms that are under relentless pressure from
natural
selection. The recent genetic results are a stringent test. The
results: 1)
Darwinism’s prediction is falsified; 2) Design’s prediction is
confirmed.
Amazon
Blog June 18, 2007

On
occasion I receive astonished
inquiries from Europeans asking how Americans can allow a judge to rule
on what
are essentially philosophical matters. Good question -- although it
seems some
European bureaucracies are getting in on the act now,
too. Amazon
Blog November 2, 2007

The
importance of this
discussion is that it sets the stage for the whole book by showing that
random
mutations much more easily debilitate genes than improve them, and that
this is
true even of the helpful mutations. Let me
emphasize, our experience with
malaria’s effects on humans (arguably our most highly studied genetic
system)
shows that most helpful mutations degrade genes.
What’s more, as a
group the mutations are incoherent, meaning that they are not adding up
to some
new system. They are just small changes -- mostly degradative -- in
pre-existing, unrelated genes. The take-home lesson is that this is
certainly
not the kind of process we would expect to build the astonishingly
elegant
machinery of the cell. If random mutation plus selective pressure
substantially
trashes the human genome, why should we think that it would be a
constructive
force in the long term? There is no reason to think so.

No
Darwinian reviewer of The
Edge of Evolution has paused long to ponder the effects of
malaria on the
human genome. I wonder why. Amazon
Blog November 2, 2007

One has to
dig hard into the data to see that the bacterium is losing
genetic info. In press coverage for this paper, he avows a “new dynamic
relationship was established” in the bacterium’s evolution, and one has
to read the details of the paper to find out that this is due to a
degradative mutation that compromises its normal ability to repair its
DNA. New
work by Richard Lenski October 21 2009

As for "no scientific controversy," even a brief excursion
into
the
history of science shows many uncontroversial, widely-accepted theories
that were in fact wrong. There was no scientific controversy in the
19th century about the existence of the ether, or the adequacy of
Newton's laws. And, if one relies on science journals for her entire
perspective, there is no controversy today about whether undirected
natural processes can account for the origin of life. Yet neither can
any scientist today detail a plausible theory of the origin of life. So
the bare question of whether some idea is or is not controversial
within the scientific community is itself simply a sociological
question, not a scientific one. Probability
and Controversy October 29 2009

"It
is just a matter of time,"
one biologist wrote recently, reposing his faith in a receding
hereafter,
"before this fruitful concept comes to be accepted by the public as
wholeheartedly as it has accepted the spherical earth and the
sun-centered solar
system." Time, however, is what evolutionary biologists have long had,
and
if general acceptance has not come by now, it is hard to know when it
ever will.The
Deniable Darwin Commentary June 1996

The
probability that a monkey will
strike a given letter is one in 26. The typewriter has 26 keys: the
monkey, one
working finger. But a letter is not a word. Should Dawkins demand that
the
monkey get two English letters right, the odds against success rise
with
terrible inexorability from one in 26 to one in 676. The Shakespearean
target
chosen by Dawkins -- "Methinks it is like a weasel"-is a six-word
sentence containing 28 English letters (including the spaces). It
occupies an
isolated point in a space of 10,000 million, million, million, million,
million,
million possibilities. This is a very large number; combinatorial
inflation is
at work. And these are very long odds. And a six-word sentence
consisting of 28
English letters is a very short, very simple English sentence.

Such
are the fatal facts. The
problem confronting the monkeys is, of course, a double one: they must,
to be
sure, find the right letters, but they cannot lose the right letters
once they
have found them. A random search in a space of this size is an exercise
in
irrelevance. This is something the monkeys appear to know...The entire
exercise
is, however, an achievement in self-deception. A target
phrase?
Iterations that most resemble the target? A Head
Monkey that measures
the distance between failure and success? If things are sightless, how
is the
target represented, and how is the distance between randomly generated
phrases
and the targets assessed? And by whom? And the Head Monkey? What of
him? The
mechanism of deliberate design, purged by Darwinian theory on the level
of the
organism, has reappeared in the description of natural selection
itself, a vivid
example of what Freud meant by the return of the
repressed.The
Deniable Darwin Commentary June 1996

Before you can
ask 'Is Darwinian theory correct or not?', You have to ask the
preliminary question
'Is it clear enough so that it could be correct?'. That's a very
different question. One of my
prevailing doctrines about Darwinian theory is 'Man, that thing is just
a mess. It's like looking
into a room full of smoke.' Nothing in the theory is precisely,
clearly, carefully defined or
delineated. It lacks all of the rigor one expects from mathematical
physics, and mathematical
physics lacks all the rigor one expects from mathematics. So
we're talking about a
gradual descent down the level of intelligibility until we reach
evolutionary biology. Expelled
April 18 2008 29.33

Matthew Arnold
put his hands on it when he spoke about the 'withdrawal of faith'.
There is a
connection between a society that has, at least, a minimal commitment
to certain kinds of
transcendental values and what human beings permit themselves to do one
to the other.
Expelled April 18 2008 1.05.18

Darwinism is
not a sufficient condition for a phenomenon like
Nazism but I think it, certainly, a necessary
one.
Expelled April 18 2008 1.06.19

Curiously
enough, for all that science may be very good thing, members of the
scientific
community are often dismayed to discover, like policemen, that they are
not
better loved. Indeed, they are widely considered self-righteous, vain,
politically immature, and arrogant. This last is considered a special
injustice.
"Contrary to what many anti-intellectuals maintain," the biologist
Massimo Pigliucci has written, science is "a much more humble
enterprise than
any religion or other ideology." Yet despite the outstanding humility
of the scientific community, anti-intellectuals persist in their sullen
suspicions.
Scientists are hardly helped when one of their champions
immerses himself
in the emollient of his own enthusiasm. Thus Richard Dawkins recounts
the story
of his professor of zoology at Oxford, a man who had "for years...
passionately believed that the Golgi apparatus was not real." On
hearing
during a lecture by a visiting American that his views were in error,
"he
strode to the front of the hall, shook the American by the hand, and
said --
with passion -- 'My dear fellow, I wish to thank you. I have been wrong
these
fifteen years.'" The story, Dawkins avows, still has the power "to
bring a lump to my throat."

It
could not
have been a very considerable lump. No similar story has ever been
recounted
about Richard Dawkins. Quite the contrary. He is as responsive to
criticism as a
black hole in space. "It is absolutely safe to say," he has remarked,
"that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution that
person is ignorant, stupid or insane." The
Devil's Delusion (2008) p.6-7

Within
mathematical physics, there is
no concept of the evidence that is divorced from the theories that it
is
evidence for, because it is the theory that determines what counts as
the evidence.
What sense could one make of the claim that top quarks exist in the
absence of
the Standard Model or particle physics? A thirteenth-century cleric
unaccountably
persuaded of their existence and babbling rapturously of quark
confinement would
have faced then the question that all religious believers now face:
Show me the
evidence. Lacking the access to the very considerable apparatus needed
to test theories
in particle physics, it is a demand he could not have
met. The
Devil's Delusion (2008) p.50

In
the Theory with which we have to deal, Absolute Ignorance is the
artificer, so that we may enunciate as the fundamental principle of the
whole system,
that IN ORDER TO MAKE A PERFECT AND BEAUTIFUL MACHINE IT IS NOT
REQUISITE TO
KNOW HOW TO MAKE IT. This proposition will be found, on careful
examination, to express in
a condensed form the essential purport of the Theory and to express in
a few words all
Mr Darwin's meaning; who, by a strange inversion of reasoning, seems to
think Absolute Ignorance fully qualified to take the place of Absolute
Wisdom in all the achievements of creative
skill.The
Transmutation of Species
(1867) p.295 see also: Daniel Dennett